Healing the deeper cause of disease by restoring the spirit to balance and harmony.
Plant Spirit Medicine is based on 5 Elements Medicine, which is a part of classical Chinese medicine, a system that developed and evolved over five thousand years. It is based on observation of the natural world and the seasons, and sees all life as belonging to this cycle.
Life energy, or Qi, flows naturally from Winter (water), to Spring (wood), to Summer (fire), to Harvest (earth), to Autumn (metal) and to Winter again. When we are in balance and harmony, our energy flows easily and feeds and nourishes all aspects of our life. We feel good in ourselves and in every season and weather. When we are out of balance, anything can hapopen. We experience symptoms in the body, mind and spirit.
The wisdom of the 5 Elements system shows that all of our problems originally stem from the one original imbalance or wound. If this original wound is treated, in time we will be restored to perfect health.
99% of illness in today is spiritual or energetic in origin, due to the imbalances in society which affect us all. An ideal way to treat such illness is with the help of Plants – in their pure energetic form. Plants understand how to live and be well in many difficult environments and conditions, and they are very willing to share this ‘medicine’ with us. Indeed, everything we need for survival on earth comes from plants.
Elemental Emotions
Emotions are central to our existence. The Five Element system has it that a human being is an emotional being, that we are always experiencing the world through our emotions. If we are in balance and harmony (which few of us are), we feel appropriate emotions according to the situation.
The general emotional tone for a balanced person is a deep contentment or joy, a feeling of connection to all things and rightness with the world and our existence in it. Interestingly, this is what Candace Pert, neuroscientist, also suggests – that our natural state is happiness.(Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion).
Although our natural state is happiness, there are five emotions which will rise and fall within us on top of this basic happiness depending on what is happening. If something happens to impede our growth, then anger naturally arises – giving us the impetus to remove the obstacle and continue our growth. Of course for British people there is a general cultural imbalance here, as we are in a society which really frowns on anger. The joke is, in New York, if someone steps on your foot, you say, “get off my foot”; in London, if someone steps on your foot, you say, “sorry”!
When your desires are fulfilled, you feel joy – not the same as the deep joy which underlies it all, but a more frothy happiness to do with satisfaction of some want. When someone is in need, the natural emotion to feel is sympathy – the emotion of the mother tending to her hurt child. ‘There there, poor you, tell me all about it’ – actually in Britain we don’t encourage sympathy much either – the famous stiff upper lip! There is a feeling of respect in the presence of that which we value, and when we lose something we value, the natural feeling is grief. Finally there is the emotion which is very much connected to feeling alive – fear. Fear is what helps to keep us alive, since it warns us to react to danger.
You can think of the emotions as being like doors – one must always be open, and when one is open the other four are closed. We feel one at a time, and when we are in balance we are able to move with ease from one to another. When imbalance is present, something goes awry with this mechanism. For some people, it’s as if one door is stuck permanently open, and there is only one emotion they feel no matter what the circumstances. For others, one door is locked closed and they simply cannot go there no matter what. For most of us, it is as if there is only one emotion that we most come alive in, though we can go in and out of the others a little.